Workshop on Evaluating Gender in U.S. Foreign Policy

MODERATOR: Good afternoon. I could invite everybody to move to the middle, since we are not exactly filling the place this afternoon.

My name is Paula Lynch. I work in the Office of the Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance here at the State Department, where I've worked for about 30 years.

And we have a panel this afternoon to talk about evaluating gender in U.S. foreign policy. And those of you who were here during the break know that we're going to proceed in a very deliberate fashion.

We have two speakers, one from the World Bank, one from Women Thrive International -- Women Thrive Worldwide, sorry, got that wrong; and I want to introduce -- and they'll speak each for about five minutes or so.

And then we'll go to questions from you, and have a very nice discussion for the rest of the afternoon.

You're welcome to ask me questions as well, but I think they're the ones that have the bulk of the information that we want to get out of this.

I work in F. I've been in the Department for 30 years, as I said, mostly in the humanitarian area. And I've heard over and over again for almost the entire time, that our programs are much too difficult, complex, changing, and just difficult to bother with doing any evaluation.

That's been a typical comment. And when you look at the Peace and Security programs and the policing programs, and humanitarian assistance, and the things that the State Department does, that are not exactly straightforward development, it's easy to understand how somebody could come to that conclusion.

But there is a different approach, which is that you look at the programs that you're doing and figure out what goals you're trying to achieve. And if you can identify the goals, then at the end of the program, you ought to be able to evaluate whether you've achieved the goals or not.

It does start with identifying goals in the beginning. Because if you don't have goals, then anything looks like it was a success, or anything can be described as your failure.

So it's really important to hone in on what exactly it is that you were trying to do from the beginning. I think that when you look at that from a gender perspective, you have to then, before you even set the goals, when you're thinking about what program you want to try to do, you have to think about what is the gender aspect of that program?

If it's, let's say, demobilization -- DDR, demobilization and -- what's the other D? -- and reintegration of soldiers. That one is one that is commonly thought of as something you're doing for men that are soldiers, maybe boys that are soldiers, but there have also been women that are soldiers, and that women have to be dealt with in a different way. They're often not armed, but they're part of the military group.

So if you take a gendered approach to looking at the problem that you're going to solve, you can then figure out how to set the goals appropriately, and then set the program up appropriately, but you deal with the actual problem that you have. I think that the idea of doing the gender analysis in advance of starting the program is one of the strongest lessons that I learned from the time that I spent doing humanitarian assistance. It's also one of the things that I think is sometimes hard to do, when you're faced with trying to do programs immediately.

Oftentimes, it's “we need money, we need to get this going in Pakistan right now, or right now in Yemen, or right now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” These places are not nice, easy development venues for doing your programming. And it's very hard to take the time to sit and think.

Sometimes it requires setting people aside and saying, "Okay, you guys are going to have to think about this, and think about the goals, think about the analysis that we need to do before we start the program."

And let them do that while the rest of the team is off, fighting the battles with Congress or with the Administration or OMB, or whatever, to there to get the program up and running. It does require some time to think. And I think that that time is often scarce with us.

Anyway, those are my introductory comments to all of this. I have no idea if that's what Nistha and Nora are planning to talk about. Probably not exactly.

But anyway, we can come back to that during the questions, if you'd like. So I'll introduce first Nistha Sinha from the World Bank, who is an economist in the Gender and Development Division of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit at the World Bank. She was a co-author of the 2007 World Development Report, and the 2007 Global Monitoring Report.

So Nistha, why don't you come up and we'll listen to you for a while?

MS. SINHA: Good afternoon, and thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today, and also for the lovely introduction. I'm probably going to touch upon all of those things. I'm in the Gender and Development Group of the World Bank, which is where we sit. We are responsible for sort of this, you know, just tracking how well the World Bank is doing in integrating gender.

So I'm coming to you with that perspective. And given that the Bank does activities at so many different levels, you know, you would probably get different textures of a level of detail, depending on who you talk to in the Bank.

So what I'm going to present to you will broadly -- it's what the Bank's sort of goal is in terms of gender, and then how the Bank evaluates; and then very quickly go through lessons.

Then I'm happy to answer questions. Gender mainstreaming is the goal that the Bank has adopted. So every activity that the Bank does, the staff is, in fact, encouraged and required to look at gender aspects in their work, whether it's loans, analytical work, policy dialogue. Anything.

Now given that it's gender mainstreaming, by its very definition, if it's really mainstreamed very well, then we shouldn't really be able to see it, or measure it concretely.

So there's always that tension, and frankly, something that we are struggling with, whenever we look at gender evaluation. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Then we do evaluations at different levels. There is Bank-wide evaluation, which is evaluating, you know, the portfolio of the Bank, in terms of analytical activities, in terms of lending activities.

Then there is evaluation at the project level, which are more specific to the project, the sector, the country that the project is in, or the lending operation is in. That's the program evaluation, really understanding that the Bank's portfolio meets its gender integration objective, or gender mainstreaming objective; or at the project level, that the project really, you know, meets its gender goals. Right.

Then the other type of evaluation that we do, and I think which is very, very important also, is impact evaluation. And which is to say, did this particular project or program actually make a difference in women's lives? Or did it actually reduce gender gaps?

And so we do both, and I think we're making progress in both, again, but not as far as we would like. And very briefly, there are guidelines available that, you know, that we are responsible for providing guidelines to teams, to, you know, how they could go about ensuring that they would be able to evaluate their programs, you know, achievement of gender-related goals, which is in preparation what they should do, what they should do when they appraise the operations, what can be done under supervision.

So we have guidelines that are available. Pretty much every sector of the Bank has guidelines available to them,that have been updated and revised.

The other thing that the Bank has done, that really facilitates and should facilitate evaluating progress and gender-related goals, are two things. One is the requirement that each project, each lending operation actually report on the number of beneficiaries. Now that might not sound very revolutionary to most people; but until very recently we were not, in fact, required to collect that information. So we didn't know what percentage of our beneficiaries were women, how many women we were reaching, which has tradeoffs, depending on the kind of sector you're looking at, the type of projects you're looking at.

But I think that that is definitely a good start, and that requirement has been instituted only starting this fiscal year. So we don't really know how that's going to work out. But that will definitely help.

And the other thing that we have that the Bank has adopted, some of the sectors have adopted, are these standardized indicators, which we call "core sector indicators." Due to sector-specific output indicators, some of which are decided by sex, again which means that as through the life of the project, these indicators are going to be tracked and then can help the project evaluate impact by sex and then on gender.

So these two things, I think, are really promising in sort of helping the Bank evaluate the progress in gender mainstreaming.

Having sort of described what the Bank does, I just want to very quickly go to lessons learned. One of the things that Paula mentioned earlier, which was objective. And that's really, really important. So for example, the independent evaluation group of the Bank recently evaluated the Bank's implementation of the gender mainstreaming policy, which is a specific policy on gender.

And it had a very specific objective, which is to see how well was this policy implemented.

Now the reason why -- and this is slightly different in terms of, you know, how you would see in a project -- but setting the objective very clearly helps assess what is it that we are evaluating.

So having made progress, how do you measure that gender integration? Is it, you know, percentage of lending activities that where women participated in the preparation of the project?

Or is it something more? Should we consider different aspects and combine everything together and form one index? But that's really important. The goal and then the matching indicator need to be something that's defined well in advance, so that we know how we'll measure progress in that indicator, and in achieving that goal.

And I'm actually going in no particular order, because I just wrote these down very quickly. The other thing that we've learned is that, especially with something like gender, projects or sectors that deal with human beings just tend to do better.

And it's simply because activities in that people who work in these sectors just, it's easy to see where in comparing men and women, and how the project or the program activities affect men and women. And so it's easy to sort of, in your reporting and then your assessment of the program, easy to see what the impacts were or defects were by male and female.

But then when it comes to more complicated programs, that's where the work is needed. So we need to sort of think a little bit clearly about -- and if you're looking at infrastructure programs or, you know, in the Bank's case, construction of highways, or power, you know, thermal plants and things like that, then really the question is, A, we can decide we don't really think these are fit to be evaluated for gender, or we decide where is it that we think gender comes in?

Is it in the institutional sort of strengthening, which the Bank, in fact, almost always is involved in? Is that where gender fits in? And people have different views on that.

What else? Yeah, I think the other sort of really important lesson that we've learned is that using mixed methods is important, which means that it's not only important to do a quantitative evaluation, which is you should have a sense of when the project started, this is where we were, and this is where we ended up, as a result of the project.

But it's also important to use methods which are more qualitative, so that you get different textures or different layers of information about the project and its impact. And it's particularly important because there are going to be these unmeasured or unmeasurable forces that affect the way the program affects men and women, which may not always be amenable to measurement. And so it's important to combine the two methods.

Now, having said all this, who is going to do this? Because typically teams, again, are very pressured. Rolling it out is very important, and then towards the end, wrapping up, as you know, people hardly have budgets, and so on.And the lesson learned there is really not a lesson learned, but a question, rather, is, do we need gender specialists in every team?

And I think the experience there has been -- that experience itself has not been evaluated. But frequently that's the -- team comes back to us with, that we need a specialist, someone who is there in the beginning, who's aware of the analysis that was done, you know, or in the country and the particular topic or the sector, and then is able to guide the team through and take on this work.

But the question is, do you need gender specialists, or do you need sector specialists, who are trained to see things from a gender perspective? That's something I just want to put out there. That's still, I think, not really clear, because there are implications, there are cost implications of having these two different types of expertise.

And I think the last one, I think, I just wanted to put on the table, in terms of lessons learned, is: What kind of expertise teams have access to? And again, this is drawing really from the work that we've been doing more gender informed impact evaluation. So recently we've supported -- there is something called a Development Impact Evaluation Initiative in the Bank, we call the DIME, where the initiative is designed to get more teams to do impact evaluations.

And what we have done is we've partnered with them, and provided gender expertise to these teams. So when they're thinking about the impact evaluation, or they're thinking of what particular, how they would treat their projects with the interventions to learn something more about gender issues, we've basically provided that just in DIME training.

And that seems to be a very promising approach, because this is a time when teams are just starting to think about their project or the intervention of their program.

And instead of having a specialist on the team with them for a time, they have available a pool of experts, who are there to comment, to help them design their intervention, help them design their impact evaluation.

And we think that that's a very promising way in which we can prepare more projects, more programs, and more teams to plan ahead and think about gender evaluation, right from the beginning.

So I'll stop there. And thank you.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Nistha. I think that will be good to build on, both from Nora and also from the questions afterwards.

Oh, I just left the -- okay, what page is it on, 17?

Nora O'Connell, right? Is from Women Thrive Worldwide. And I'm remembering that. She actually led a panel for us in the QDDR process, to help us think about gender and new ways of thinking, as we worked through the QDDR issues as the gender team.

She's the Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs at Women Thrive Worldwide, and she's responsible for the policy and advocacy work on international development issues. So without further adieu, I will give you to Nora. And then we'll have time for questions afterwards. Thank you.

MS. O'CONNELL: Hi. Good afternoon. I'm glad to be here with the bitter-enders, who have stuck it out to the end of the day. And just really thanks to Paula and to the State Department for the invitation to be here today.I'm going to start for a minute with Why Gender? I have a feeling the people who are here are already probably bought into gender being important. But just to sort of say for a moment, actually the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group has done evaluations of the World Bank's work. And they have found that projects that have gender objectives and achieve those gender objectives are more effective at reaching their overall goals than projects that don't have gender objectives.

So when we actually talked to, you know, policy-makers in our advocacy work, we actually say, "You don't have to care about gender. You don't have to care about women. But if you care about results, then you will integrate gender, because that's what you need to do to get the results that you want." And that's true, whether you're talking about the elections in Afghanistan. It's true whether you're talking about emergency relief in Haiti, or long-term development in Ghana.

So that's just something that I think we all know, but it's important for us to really acknowledge that it's something that will help us achieve our overall goals.

I'm going to talk a little bit about gender in two different ways. One is about the work of USAID and the State Department in evaluating gender in that, and the second is looking at how the State Department and USAID can evaluate themselves on how they're looking at gender, sort of similar to what Nistha was talking about the process at the World Bank.

I just really want to build on what both Paula and Nistha said, in that sometimes we get the question like, "Well, if there's one place we have to integrate gender or if there's one kind of project where it's important to have gender, can we just pick one?"

And unfortunately, the answer is "No." Because gender is about people. It's not just about women. Gender means understanding the different rights, resources, roles and responsibilities of men and women.

In Latin America, boys are dropping out of school at higher rates than girls. That's gender analysis. Why is that a problem? What needs to happen to keep boys in school?

But it also means understanding the relationships between women and men. We're not going to be effective at increasing the use of family planning, unless men buy into family planning as well as women.

So how are we understanding that their lives relate to each other, that there are power relationships there? And that's part of women running for office? It's part of security strategies. It's part of development. It's also really multilevel. As both Paula and Nistha were saying, we really have to keep in mind that when we're looking at the overall context, our overall analysis of a situation, just like you would do good political analysis, and good economic analysis on the front end, you need to do really good social analysis, so you understand what are those dynamics happening in the country.

And so then when you're looking at what are your country's strategic plans, what are your goals, and what you're going to evaluate, you've taken gender into account at the front end.

I think too often, gender is thought of as something that is dealt with at the project level, but isn't really understood that it also impacts the strategic planning and budgeting levels.

So one of the things about gender is I think it runs some of the same risks in terms of evaluation as technology. It’s sort of thought of as an end in and of itself sometimes, and could be sort of seen as this abstract system that really has to work.

You know, but in fact technology at its best is a tool for people to use to solve their problems. And we have to really think about evaluation in the same way, and that it has to be used as a tool for people to help them do their jobs better.

I was just reading this book by this guy, Joseph Lerner (phonetic) about how people make decisions. And he cited this study that was done with MIT business students. And every student was allowed to choose their own investment portfolio.

They split them into two groups. One group, the information they were given on their stock portfolio was just the price, whether it went up or down. The other group was given unlimited access to information: MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, experts. Which group do you think did better in terms of their performance? It was actually the group with less access to information.

And the reason for that is the group with so much information, they were unable to sort of sift through what were the most important things, and what weren't the most important things. And there was information overload.

So they were kind of distracted by rumors of this and, you know, different things happening. They were buying and selling stocks much more frequently, and they had much poorer performance.

So I think remembering that evaluation, if it's not used by people, it's a waste in resources. And so we have to really prioritize what are the most important things that we learn, and that gender is really understood to be one of those priority things.

The other piece is sort of who is the customer? And I'm a big Apple Mac fan. I've got my iPhone and my Mac and my iPad. And what I love about it is when I want to know the weather, I look at my iPhone and I press on the picture of the sun Right? That's how I find out what the weather is. It's very end-user oriented.

And I think for evaluation, it's the same thing. You really have to think about who do we want to use this information? So it's the people in the USAID missions. It's the people in the embassies. It's the people here in Washington working on strategies. It's people in Congress. And it's organizations like mine, that make your lives more difficult when we don't get access to the information and we request more Congressional reports, which drive you crazy.

But really taking a look at who are the end-users of it, and making sure that also those end-users understand why gender is important for the results they're looking for, so that they will help collect that data, because those are people who are important to gather the data, and they will use the gender data in their analysis of the situation.

The second piece is, I think, and you know, Nistha was talking about qualitative data collection, which I think is really important. And part of qualitative data collection should also be talking about people in countries, who are the intended beneficiaries of your policies. Do the people who are part of an agricultural development project, did they feel like it made their lives better, or not?

So really kind of keeping in mind those principals of aid effectiveness, of transparency, or country ownership of donor harmonization, those things all need to be built into evaluation processes as well.

The other thing I want to talk about quickly, before I wrap up, is how State and USAID evaluate their own work on gender. Because there is incredible leadership now in both agencies, that are really deeply committed to integrating gender, and that understand why it's valuable.

And I think the challenge for those of us who are already sort of bought into this as a goal is: How do we translate this political moment into a shift in how the agencies do business?

So it really becomes institutionalized in terms of how we do everything, so that when we're in a crunch strategy to do something in the DRC, we understand we're not going to get a good strategy in the DRC unless we understand how rape is being used a weapon in war, and what's that doing to the restabilization of communities?

So fortunately, there's a lot of experience about what are the things that agencies, the indicators that they can use to evaluate their progress on, on gender integration?

One of them is leadership. And that's something where again, it's incredibly strong right now. We all respond to the things that our bosses are saying are important to them. It sends a very strong message.

And the other is how strong is the gender leadership within the organization? I mean, you take Milan Girvir (phonetic) and Besra Girvir (phonetic) as an example, where she brings incredible depth of experience, she has a high-level office, she has a personal relationship to the Secretary. That carries an important message on the priority of that issue within the State Department.

The second issue is, is there a clear mandate? Do people understand what's expected within the agency and how to do that? And I think the MCC is actually a great example of a U.S. government agency that has a very strong gender policy, that lays out very clearly how they will integrate gender into all aspects of their work.

The third is capacity, which is something that Nistha talked about. And I think when you talk about gender and evaluation, it's a very key issue, because if you don't have the capacity and the expertise to do it in, you may have sort of the will, but you won't really end up with the right things.

And I just recently came back from Africa, where I visited two countries and was speaking with the USAID mission director, who was talking about they're doing a lot of work on food security in this country, and they were able to actually access the gender-technical expertise they need for their country's strategy. And it's one of the focus countries of the initiative.

And it's because even though there's been an increase in number of staff, who are agricultural experts to staff this, there hasn't been enough of an increase in gender in agricultural experts, who really understand what are the complex dynamics in the sub-Saharan Africa; agriculture is a very, very gendered field, from what crops people produce to what role they play in the process, to who controls the income.

The fourth area is resources. Integrating gender is cost-effective, but it does take resources. And it is important to track what are the resources available, both on a project level, as well as on an agency-wide level.

And the fifth is accountability. Personnel systems that actually hold people accountable for gender integration. DIFID (phonetic) actually has a great example, where the top 100 personnel at DIFID have gender built into their performance evaluations.

And they also have a bonus pool, that is reserved for people who have high performance on gender. And that's in addition to sort of having the accountability in the actual programs, how it's built in at that level. So there's also a lot of experience on how organizations themselves can do that self-evaluation on gender integration. So with that, I will stop, and we can hopefully have a good discussion. Thanks.

MODERATOR: Okay. I don't have people rushing to the microphones. But there is a microphone in that corner, and a microphone right back here. And if you want me to stop talking at some point, then you're going to have to ask a question.

So please get up and start moving. I wanted to talk just a little bit, until anyone gets to a microphone, about the experience I had during the '90s in working with UNHCR, in particular, a little bit with ICRC as well -- that's the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross -- to work on gender integrated in their programs.

But first I'm going to listen to that question.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is (inaudible) Van Dunn (phonetic) and I'm from the Office of Global Health at USAID.

My question is, of your programs and your agencies and the work that you've been doing, have there been assessments and evaluations, and reviews about how third genders and transgendered activities are being integrated into programs?

MODERATOR: Okay. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think they have been at State, anyway.But my plan was to take a couple of questions, and then let people have a little bit more time to think about their answer. So let's have another question.

QUESTION: Yeah. I was wondering if Nora could repeat her comment about whether programs that had gender-specific objectives had better results. I wanted to know whether I understood what you were saying properly there.And secondly, I was wondering whether in the process of putting together programs and projects that require some element of strategic communications, whether that tends to have different components, if the target audience is -- there's a specific gender being targeted, and what's the process of conceptualizing how that might be different to get at the audience you want?

MODERATOR: Okay. Let's see, that was like three in one. So I think we may have enough questions to start with answers. If either of you wants to?

(Discussion held off mike.)

MODERATOR: Yes, you come up here so you can get recorded. We're not being filmed, but we are being recorded. Thank goodness we're not being filmed.

MS. SINHA: So to answer the first question, has there been an evaluation for our agency's work? At the World Bank, we recently had an evaluation of the Bank's gender mainstreaming policy. And this was done by an independent evaluation group, and they looked specifically at the implementation of the policy, which was started -- yeah, the policy was approved in 2003.

And so they had up to eight years to look at the -- sorry, seven years of data to look at. And they looked at a number of things.

First of all, the policy has some specific sort of approaches that it recommends, through which gender should be integrated in the World Bank's activities. And so the evaluation basically looked at different elements, so which is what I was referring to the Bank's methods, so they basically did interviews with, we had general focal points, with interviews with teams.

The evaluation looked at country-assisted strategies and how they integrated gender. It also looked at loans, about a thousand loans that were approved within this period. And so they looked at a combination of these things. And basically their conclusion is that, yes, although the Bank has been doing better, you know, since the 1990s, but that there is a lot of work that still needs to be done, if you're simply looking at the implementation of the policy.

Of course, the Bank has gender in a number of other policies, but it was focusing on this particular one.So you know, it's been very helpful in getting a number of sort of follow-up action into it, which is essentially in terms of accountability that Nora was referring to, which is -- the policy sets all these guidelines.

But I think the biggest lesson is: The policy could exist, but then how do you invigorate your staff to actually implement this? And how do you hold people accountable? And that's been the big lesson for us.

QUESTION: So just to clarify, the study I was citing was not the evaluation that Nistha is talking about, that was specifically about evaluating their gender policy.

This was an evaluation of their overall programs for the effectiveness of their programs, and they found that programs that had gender objectives within the program -- so it might be an agricultural development program or it might be a health, or it may be an infrastructure project -- if it had gender objectives and it reached those gender objectives, it was more likely to reach its overall objective for that sector.

So integrating gender helps you have more effective programs overall, even if you're not specifically coming to it with an agenda of empowering women.

MS. O'CONNELL: On the point about integrating transgendered folks into programs, I don't know of anything specific about that. But I think the organization, Global AIDS Alliance, may do some work along those lines, and I'd be happy to put you in touch with someone there, if you're interested.

And on the question about how you think about it in terms of strategic communications, it's actually a huge issue in terms of communications.

I mean, from the basics of especially outside the Capitol, women are much more likely to get their information from radio than from other sources.

But also a lot of information -- and we've been looking particularly at agriculture and food security, in Africa in particular -- a lot of information gets passed among men in bars.

In the evenings, men will go to bars and they'll make deals, they'll make connections. There is sort of a platform for information sharing. And women actually don't have the same platforms for information sharing.

So figuring out where do women go to share information and how they share information is really important. Is it, you know, do they go -- is it something that happens at the hair dresser? Is there a women's association in that community? You know, what are the ways that they do it?

So there are actually very different ways, because in a lot of societies, men and women are very socially segregated. So figuring out where women get information, and you layer on top that that women generally have lower literacy rates, are less likely to be literate in whatever the formal language in the country -- like if it's, you know, English in Ghana or French in Burkina Faso, the issues of language are also really important too.

So I think it's a really great question. And absolutely it's really important to think about that.

MODERATOR: I want to address that question as well, and particularly from getting as practical as possible. I think at the risk of being too simple for some of you who've done a lot of work on gender, it's important to see the practical reality of if you do set a gender objective, what exactly that means.

It doesn't mean that you decide in advance that you're going to do something for women in a particular way. It means that you go in and you look at who's on the ground. And you look at who are the people here, what ethnic group are they, what gender are they, who's doing the work, who's doing which work? Everybody works, but who's doing which work?

In the humanitarian sphere, where we work a lot with displaced populations, you look at how has their work changed in displacement? How have their roles changed in displacement?

And then you really have to pay attention to how women's lives have changed and how men's lives have changed, because they change in very different ways.

And so you don't get at the keys to ameliorating the situation, unless you pay attention to what's different for the women and what's different for the men.

I think that that also -- not to draw us into completely talking about displacement -- in fact, a very general way of saying it is that women's lives get about three times tougher in a camp situation or in a displaced situation, and men no longer have the work that they had, probably paid work, to do, because they're displaced.

And so they end up with no meaningful activities and end up causing a lot of trouble. That's not true across the board, but in many cases.

And the women are faced with about three times the amount of work just to do their basic jobs in the family and the house. That creates a huge amount of issues that you can then figure out how you need to address.

But even just looking at the agriculture issue in Africa, it's pretty commonly known that -- or pretty commonly said, I don't know where the facts are -- but I mean, I know that it's true -- about 70 percent of African farmers are women.

Well, that means if you're designing an agriculture program, where you're trying to reach farmers, you better think about how you reach women. Because if you're only thinking about how you reach anybody, then you're likely to miss -- if your aim isn't at women, you're going to miss a lot of the farmers that you're trying to reach. So you do need to pay attention.

We've got five minutes, okay.

(Discussion was held off mike.)

MODERATOR: Oh. Well, then, just let me finish my sentence.

So the point is, that you need to look at the population and all the characteristics of the population, of which gender is a really important and constant characteristic.

I just want to say three more phrases, that won't even be full sentences. I think the issue of having POCs for gender and gender advisors sometimes is a trap, because you end up with the person who's the gender point of contact being the person who does everything on gender, and no one else thinks they have to do anything on gender.

That married up with having gender in work requirements of the senior leadership sometimes works, because then the accountability is at a broader level than just the single gender point of contact.

And I think training on teaching the "ah-ha" moments of "Oh, that's why it's important" is really, really crucial in organizations.

And I wish that we did more of that here, and hope that we'll see a lot of movement in that direction in the coming future.

So thank you very much for attending. I'm sorry we had sort of an abrupt end to this. But thanks very much and thanks for the questions, because you can't have a discussion if you don't have questions.

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